When the next European World War starts, where will I be?
By Matthew Parish
Tuesday 29 September 2026
There is a peculiar question that begins to occupy the mind when one has lived for long enough in a country at war. It is not precisely the question of whether one will survive, because that is too melodramatic and in any event survival is generally a matter of statistics, luck and knowing when not to stand next to a window. Nor is it the question of when the war will end, because after several years one learns that wars do not end in the tidy fashion suggested by history books. They mutate, pause, spread, freeze, reignite and acquire new names.
The question is rather more personal. When the next European World War starts, where will I be, and will I even notice immediately that it has begun?
Perhaps I will be in a bar in Kharkiv. This seems entirely possible. There will be soldiers drinking vodka, somebody will be arguing furiously in Russian with somebody else who insists upon arguing back in Ukrainian, a young woman will be explaining that her NGO has run out of money and somebody will have left something alarming on the bar. The music will be too loud, the lights will flicker because the electricity supply is uncertain and outside expensive black cars will come and go for reasons nobody quite understands.
Then my telephone will vibrate and somebody will say that Russian missiles have crossed another frontier. I will look at the message, show it to the person next to me and order another drink. Nobody in the bar will pay much attention because everyone there will already have spent years living in the European war that the rest of Europe has suddenly discovered.
This is one of the strange things Ukraine teaches you about war. From London, Paris, Berlin or Brussels, war appears as an extraordinary event that interrupts normality. Television programmes are cancelled, Prime Ministers address their nations, maps appear on screens and retired generals are summoned from their gardens to television studios to explain the meaning of arrows.
In Ukraine, war is normality. People go to work during air-raid alarms, couples quarrel while ballistic missiles are in the air and restaurants remain open until curfew approaches. Children do their homework, soldiers swipe through dating applications, somebody always needs to buy cigarettes and somebody else is invariably worried about paying the rent. Life does not stop for history because history, inconsiderately, refuses to stop for life.
Europe may shortly have to learn this lesson, although there is nothing inevitable about its doing so. Predictions of great wars have an embarrassing history and every generation contains people convinced that catastrophe is just around the corner. Sometimes they are wrong, and occasionally they are disastrously right.
History is not a railway timetable, and there is no mechanical sequence by which the war in Ukraine must become a general European war. Nevertheless, it is difficult to survey contemporary Europe without recognising that many of the assumptions underlying the continent’s security after the end of the Cold War have been substantially eroded. Large-scale territorial warfare has returned to Europe, governments are thinking again about military preparedness and concepts such as deterrence, mobilisation, civil defence and strategic resilience have returned to ordinary political conversation.
Yet something psychologically curious persists in western Europe. Many Europeans still appear to imagine war as something that happens elsewhere, as though conflict were principally a geographical category and peace an inherent characteristic of prosperous countries.
Ukraine is elsewhere. Donbas is elsewhere. Kharkiv is elsewhere. Kupiansk is very definitely elsewhere. A missile destroying an apartment building can therefore be processed as news rather than experience. One may express sympathy, shake one’s head, change the television channel and put the kettle on.
Geography, however, has an inconvenient habit of refusing to respect psychological boundaries. Europe has repeatedly discovered this throughout its history, usually after spending some years persuading itself of the contrary.
Were a wider European conflict ever to emerge from the current confrontation between Russia and the West, it might not begin with anything resembling the opening scenes of a twentieth-century war. There need be no declaration delivered by an ambassador in a morning coat, no mobilisation posters pasted upon railway stations and perhaps no single morning upon which everyone wakes up and agrees that peace ended during the night. There might instead be a sequence of events whose significance becomes apparent only retrospectively: sabotage, cyber attacks, disruption of communications, attacks upon infrastructure, incidents involving military aircraft, confrontations at sea or an escalation surrounding forces positioned along NATO’s eastern frontier.
For several hours, perhaps several days, everybody might argue about whether the war had actually begun. Television studios would fill with experts debating terminology while governments issued carefully drafted statements saying that they were establishing the facts, and social media would manufacture certainty long before anybody possessed reliable information.
That would be characteristically twenty-first century. We have become extraordinarily good at constructing categories between war and peace: hybrid warfare, grey-zone operations, cyber operations, deniable attacks, proxy warfare, information warfare and strategic sabotage. These expressions are intellectually useful, but they also reveal an uncomfortable truth. Modern states may be engaged in forms of conflict long before their populations recognise themselves as being at war.
Ukraine has lived inside this ambiguity since 2014 and beyond it since February 2022. Ukrainians therefore possess a political knowledge that most western Europeans do not. They know what happens after the abstraction becomes concrete, when geopolitical analysis becomes the noise outside the window and the map on television becomes the railway line on which your family is travelling.
The first surprise is how quickly human beings adapt. The second is how badly institutions sometimes do, because bureaucracies are peculiarly resistant to accepting that history has interrupted their procedures.
Forms still need filling in, banks continue asking questions, landlords continue wanting rent and municipal authorities continue digging up roads. Universities hold conferences, journalists argue about punctuation, lovers betray one another, people get drunk, people get married, babies are born and dogs need walking. The sublime and the ridiculous become inseparable, which may be one reason why war produces such extraordinarily dark humour among those obliged to live through it.
This is why I sometimes wonder whether, if a wider European war begins, I will recognise the moment. Perhaps I will be sitting in a café writing an article about something completely different when somebody sends me a message saying that there has been an explosion somewhere whose name suddenly matters enormously.
I will search for confirmation and the internet will immediately fill with photographs, rumours, propaganda, recycled videos and confident explanations by people who know nothing whatsoever. Another message will arrive, then another, and gradually the map inside everybody’s head will change. A place that yesterday was merely a name will have become a symbol before lunchtime.
Wars transform geography before they transform almost anything else. Places that yesterday seemed insignificant acquire enormous emotional significance because events force us to learn their names. Bucha was once simply a pleasant town outside Kyiv, Bakhmut was a provincial city few foreigners could have located and Kramatorsk was principally a railway and industrial centre. Mariupol was a port on the Sea of Azov. These names subsequently became shorthand for immense human experiences.
A wider European conflict would create another vocabulary. Narva, Suwałki, Rzeszów and Constanța might suddenly become familiar to people who had never previously thought about them, while places nobody presently discusses might dominate every newspaper in the world. This is one of war’s cruellest geographical tricks: it makes obscure places famous by destroying them.
Then there is the question contained within the title of this essay. Where will I be, once the distinction between the Ukrainian war and a wider European conflict becomes harder to maintain?
There was a time when my instinctive answer might have been somewhere safe. That is the rational answer, because when artillery begins firing sensible people move away from the artillery and when missiles are falling one should ideally arrange to live somewhere they are not falling. Civilisation has survived partly because human beings possess the good sense to run away from things likely to kill them.
After living alongside Ukraine’s war, however, the concept of safety becomes more complicated. There is physical safety, obviously, but there is also the peculiar moral discomfort of watching from afar while people one knows remain behind. Once places cease being dots upon maps and become collections of friends, cafés, railway stations, jokes, memories and familiar streets, evacuation acquires an emotional price.
The question “Why don’t they just leave?” is generally asked by people who have never had to decide what leaving actually means. To leave a city may be easy enough if one possesses a passport, money and somewhere to go, but to leave one’s life is something altogether different.
That is one reason millions of Ukrainians remain in a country at war. It is not because they are indifferent to danger, nor because Ukrainians possess some mystical national immunity to fear. They remain because this is where their lives are, and human beings do not experience countries as geopolitical abstractions. They experience them as kitchens, friendships, arguments, jobs, favourite tables in restaurants and the particular route they walk home at night.
Europe might discover this if war spreads. The comfortable assumption is that a great European conflict would produce clear moral and geographical divisions, with a front and a rear, soldiers fighting while civilians remain behind them, governments knowing what is happening and journalists explaining it.
Ukraine suggests something messier. Modern war reaches deep into civilian life because drones fly hundreds of kilometres, missiles cross countries in minutes and cyber attacks ignore borders altogether. Railway networks, electricity grids, telecommunications systems, ports and data centres acquire strategic significance, while information itself becomes contested terrain.
Every citizen carrying a smartphone becomes simultaneously a witness, a consumer of propaganda, a potential source of intelligence and a participant in the preservation of ordinary life. The distinction between battlefield and home consequently becomes considerably less comfortable than Europeans might prefer.
Yet none of this need lead to despair. Ukraine also teaches another lesson, insufficiently understood by those who see the country exclusively through photographs of destroyed buildings and maps showing moving front lines. Human beings are remarkably difficult to intimidate indefinitely.
Terror has diminishing returns. The first explosion terrifies, the hundredth irritates and eventually people begin complaining that the air-raid alarm interrupted dinner. This is not because danger has disappeared but because the human mind cannot remain permanently terrified. Fear is metabolised into routine, humour, fatalism and occasionally extraordinary courage.
That psychological adaptation may prove to be one of Ukraine’s most important contributions to Europe’s understanding of itself. Ukrainians have learned something about human resilience that comfortable societies would rather never need to discover, and the lesson is simultaneously reassuring and terrible.
For decades, European integration was constructed around the proposition that peace was normal. This was an extraordinary achievement. Generations grew up for whom crossing from France into Germany required no passport and carried no historical anxiety, while cities once destroyed by artillery became weekend destinations reached by budget airlines. The European project transformed borders soaked in blood into administrative lines barely visible from a train.
But peace should never be confused with a law of nature. Peace is an institution, a political achievement maintained by habits, alliances, economic relationships, diplomacy and ultimately the willingness of societies to defend the arrangements that keep violence at bay.
The tragedy of Europe is that every few generations somebody forgets this. The achievement of Europe is that after each catastrophe somebody remembers it again, although the price of remembering has historically been appalling.
Ukraine is currently doing much of the remembering for everybody else. Ukrainians have been compelled to rediscover ideas that western Europeans had hoped belonged in museums: trenches, mobilisation, blackouts, military funerals, destroyed cities and the sudden knowledge that the decisions of distant governments may determine whether one’s neighbourhood exists tomorrow morning.
So when the next European World War starts — if that dreadful expression ever becomes appropriate — where will I be? I suspect I will be somewhere in Ukraine, partly because by then Ukraine may seem a strangely familiar place from which to watch Europe encounter a reality Ukrainians have already been living with for years.
Perhaps it will be Lviv, Kyiv or Kharkiv. Perhaps I will be standing in some railway station at three o’clock in the morning, drinking terrible coffee while trying to understand why the train has stopped, or sitting with soldiers who have already spent years fighting the war that everybody else has only just discovered.
They may find Europe’s sudden panic rather amusing. Somebody on television will undoubtedly announce that this changes everything, because whenever history accelerates there is always somebody available to announce that everything has changed.
The Ukrainians may look at one another and shrug. For them, everything changed long ago, and the rest of Europe will merely have caught up.
